Forty years ago Roberta Wohlstetter wrote the definitive analysis of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- until recently the nations most costly intelligence failure. The problem, she said, was "signal-to-noise" ratio. This problem of signal-to-noise ratio is so fundamental in the intelligence business that today, if one refers to the "Roberta Wohlstetter problem," almost everyone knows exactly what you are talking about. Never underestimate the value of a good tool properly employed. But don't expect it to solve everything, especially over the long term. Your enemy is watching you, he has read his Claude Shannon, and he has some good tools of his own. Innovation creates, and evolution destroys, in a cycle that is both virtuous and vicious. Intelligence is a microcosm of the world. In technology. In culture. In nearly everything, it seems. Perhaps this is to be expected; like information theory, fractals are everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Maybe the theory of everything is also the theory of nothing, and so every theory is the theory of everything, in its own way. Spying in the Post-September 11 World | 
